Effective manipulations - Colour emphesis

Here's an extremly effective little photoshop tutorial on how to add some colour emphesis to your photos.

Choose an image where there's a certain feature or object which you wish to stand out in colour. I have chosen a photo that I wish to have emphesis on the blue eyes.

1. Open your image in photoshop as usual.

2. To start, let's make the image black and white. Go to Image > Mode > Grayscale

Now your image should be in grayscale (black and white).

3. Let's copy your black and white version. Go to Select > Select All then Edit > Copy

4. Open your original coloured image into a new photoshop document.

Next let's paste your colour version that we copied earlier.

5. Go to Edit > Paste. Make sure that you put your black and white version above your coloured one.

So now you should see your black and white version (with your coloured one underneath).

6. Simply zoom in to your image and gently erase over the area that you wish to have the coloured emphesis on. (For my example it was the eyes). So using an eraser with around 60% opacity, erase this section of your grayscale layer.

Now your coloured layer should show through in that certain section.

You can leave your image here at this stage since it will have a nice effect to it already but to really bring out the colour you can follow the next few steps.

7. Go to Image > Adjustments > Brigntness/Contrast

8. Tweak the contrast especially so that it has a higher contrast.

9. Now for an even stronger colour, go to Image > Adjustments > Colour Balance

10. You can now play with the colour needles until you get a nice strong colour effect.


As simple as that.

Sam